Painted Bluffs
The tax is what you are actually evaluating here. A colorless tap for one mana is the floor, but the line that matters charges an extra generic mana every time you want a colored result, which puts the effective rate at two mana per colored pip. That is the steep end of the rainbow-land spectrum: the design buys universal color access by making the fixing slow, so it functions less like a fixer in a tight curve and more like a mana sink that smooths long games where the extra mana stops mattering. It belongs to a lineage of "any color, but it costs you" lands that trades the tempo hit of a tapland for a recurring per-use fee instead. The Desert type is the quieter half of the card: it carries no inherent ability here, but it slots into the web of cards that count Deserts, fetch them, or punish them, which gives a colorless land that would otherwise be invisible a typeline worth caring about in the right shell. The honest read is a fixer for decks that have more colors than they have ways to support them and enough late-game mana to absorb the tax without flinching.


